Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African parliament, and someone who spent a large part of his life under true apartheid, understands that this lie not only slanders Israel, but wrongly diminishes the terrible suffering of South African blacks who experienced true apartheid:

Almost 140 years ago, Lewis Carroll created Humpty Dumpty, a malevolent, controlling, arrogant figure who maintained power in his relationship with Alice (of Wonderland fame) by denying her the ability either to speak her mind or to understand his. Whatever she said, he quarreled with her word choice, and whatever he said, she was unable to understand. In Humpty Dumpty’s hands, meaning became fluid and dangerous. Moreover, when Alice called him on the fact, Humpty Dumpty boasted that word meanings were subordinate to him and his needs:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

Alice was just having a dream, but we are living in a Humpty Dumpty nightmare, one that sees words uncoupled from their previously understood meanings. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the words the world uses to describe Israel. For example, “apartheid” is (or used to be) a very specific word: It was a South African word used to describe the systematic state created and controlled disenfranchisement of South Africa’s black citizens. They were denied all but the most minimal civil rights, kept in segregated ghettos, demeaned, dehumanized, and impoverished.

The South African government’s acts were immoral so the word “apartheid” was not merely descriptive, but value-laden. When the Left co-opts that word to describe Israel, it knows that credulous and uninformed people around the world will immediately assume that Arabs living within the State of Israel are immorally kept as second class citizens with minimal civil rights, kept in segregated ghettos, etc. The truth, however, is quite different. Arabs in Israel have more freedoms and rights than Arabs in just about any other Middle Eastern state (or maybe any Middle Eastern state).

Of course, this superb video will not put to rest the slander against Israel, because the slanderers are entirely unconcerned with truth. Nevertheless, for those who may still have open minds, this is an interesting and instructive video comparing faux apartheid Israel to real apartheid South Africa:

Think about it: Iraq expelled her Jews and hounded her Christians into obscurity. Saudi Arabia makes it illegal to be Jewish or Christian — so there are no Jews or Christians, making it a nice, homogenous population. Iran also simply expelled or murdered different people. The same holds true for Arab/Muslim state after Arab/Muslim state, all of whom are in good odor at the UN.

The secret, therefore, to avoid this insulting epithet isn’t to try to accommodate your hostile minority populations. Instead, the secret is to destroy them entirely. Once they’re good and gone, and once you’ve become a completely homogeneous racial or religious state by virtue of their (enforced) absence, nobody can tar you with the crime of being an “apartheid state.”

Speaking of Africa, when are we going to wean the dark continent? Are we ever going to get over this nutty notion that we have an obligation to keep pumping money down that particular sewer? It’s bad enough that George Bush is convinced that billions of American tax dollars — money that could better be spent trying to cure Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and ALS — should be squandered dealing with AIDS in Africa, but Obama has already endorsed the U.N.-inspired giveaway known as the Global Poverty Act. It’s estimated that filling this particular Christmas stocking would run us $845 billion. Worse yet, most of this largesse would wind up in the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of those various thugs, such as Omar al-Bashir, Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo, Isayas Afeworki and the aforementioned Robert Mugabe, who run Africa the way that Al Capone ran Chicago.

What Prelutsky rather surprisingly forgets is that America’s political and economic involvement in Africa was never really about the Africans. That is, while a bunch of individuals and NGOs today may be genuinely concerned about the plight of individual citizens in that benighted continent, the West’s support for Africa was simply an outcropping of the Cold War. Once the old Imperialism vanished, Africa was the place of a thousand proxy battles between the Americans and the Soviets. Savvy tinpot tyrants in Africa, freed from the benefits and burdens of their former imperial ties, quickly learned that they could increase the flow of money into their coffers by playing the two Superpowers off against each other.

Even South Africa wasn’t about apartheid as far as the Superpowers were concerned. Instead it was about a West-leaning white government that found itself facing a black opposition that got funding from the Soviets. And before you start thinking that the Soviets funded the blacks because of a principled stand vis a vis apartheid, abandon that thought immediately. The Soviets funded the blacks only because the government, at a political level separate from apartheid, allied itself with the West.

Nowadays, with the face-off being one between Islam and the West, Sudan is exactly the modern South Africa. It’s not the slaughter that’s the problem — sadly, that’s par for the course in Africa — it’s the nature of the hand wielding the machete that’s the problem. You see, this time around it’s not a Communist hand, it’s an Islamic hand. Of course, 30 years ago, America would have done something, not out of any Carter-esque human rights mushiness, but because the Sudan had suddenly become a front in a larger ideological war, not between the Sudanese, but between America and her enemies. Things are different now, when we just stand on the sidelines wringing our hands.

All of which means that our presence in Africa, which looks like a lot of mushy, emotionally driven money, is in fact a Cold War legacy. And it turns out that our presence their may still be necessary as we fight proxy battles against yet another Communist entity — China. You see China is doing a fair bit of meddling in Africa now and, given Africa’s vast natural reserves, it’s not in America’s interests to let that continent drift irrevocably away from the West and land in the Chinese orbit:

Close on the heels of the latest sham election in Zimbabwe, the International Criminal Court announced last week that it is seeking the arrest of the president of Sudan on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. As Africa notches up more failures on the long road out of colonialism, a new pseudo-colonial power–China–is busily engaged in getting exactly what it wants out of the continent. The implications for the kind of political and economic evolution likely to unfold in Africa are significant.

Until about 20 years ago, China’s interest in Africa consisted mainly of encouraging Marxist revolutionary factions. Lately, however, that interest has taken a decidedly economic turn. China is in the market for most of Africa’s products and is selling its own there as well. Once a major oil exporter, China became a net importer of oil in 1993 and is now dependent on imports for half its oil and natural gas. To meet this need, it has diversified its sources, in particular making deals with most of Africa’s oil-producing states.

Just in the past three years, Beijing has signed energy deals with Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, and Sudan. Its investment in Sudan’s pipeline and refinery infrastructure, valued at between $3 billion and $5 billion, is mind-boggling in such a poor country, but it is not unusual for the energy industry. China bought a stake in a Nigerian offshore field two years ago for $2.5 billion and promised to invest the same amount in further exploration and development.

China has huge investments in Algeria, with whose government it is also cooperating on the development of nuclear energy, and Angola, which this spring overtook Nigeria as the continent’s largest producer of oil.

Read more about China and Africa here — and keep in mind that, as has always been the case, while ordinary citizens agitate about Africa because it’s pathetic, governments get involved there because it’s important.